Piano and Harpsichord Keys and Keyboard Compass

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Keys and Keyboards

This article provides a short history of keys and keyboard compass. The German word "Klavier," which can refer to any keyboard instrument, possibly derives from the Greek word "celava"
which means club (because most of the early organ keys were hit not
played); but it is more likely that it came from the Latin word "clavis,"
meaning key, as this is where the English word key derived from. On
early organs, the keys were marked with the pitch. These were
translated into letters which were called "clavis."

The Roman water organ had a row of
little levers. Evidence for this can be found on mosaics and
carvings dating from before the collapse of Imperial Rome.
During the tenth century there was an organ at Winchester Cathedral with 40 stops and two manuals, probably consisting of lever type
keys, all naturals with no accidentals, taking, it is said,
three men to play it. The organ was the first instrument with a
keyboard, and the weight of its keys, like that of many other
instruments, varied. So much so, that it took the strength of a
man's fist to push down one of the crude levers, which to us would
hardly be recognisable as a key. It was not unknown for players to
be called "organ beaters." Organ players began complaining of uneven
touch on the organs. A contract between an organ builder and Rouen
Cathedral in 1382 refers to the repair of the keyboard with the purpose of making it more uniform and lighter in touch. However, parts of an
organ dated 226 AD and found near Budapest had keys no heavier than
those of a modern piano. Throughout the ages, touch has been one of
the gripes of the performer. Even the great Silberman, who trained
most of the great piano makers of the 1700s, was criticised by J. S.
Bach, who said that Silberman pianos were too hard to play. This
was around 1733.

The first sharp to be added to the keyboard was probably the F sharp, according to academic research. A painting by Van Eyck suggests that the fashion around 1430 was for narrower keys than in earlier years, with the use of sharps confirmed. Since around 1450 the keyboard has remained virtually the same except for minor variations in the width of the keys and the coverings of the short and long keys
respectively as white and black or black and white.

By the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,
keyboards consisted of what we would call the naturals, or white
note keys, with the church modes as the basis for the musical system. The interval of an augmented fourth, between the notes we would call F and B, was considered discordant, so the B was often lowered, bringing in an
extra note, B flat, shorter and narrower, between the A and the B.
After the B flat probably came the E flat, then C sharp and finally G
sharp. They would have been tuned more or less as pure thirds to the natural keys, that is, the B flat as a true third below D, F sharp as a true third above the D etc. But today's arrangement of naturals and sharps or flats was depicted in a painting as long ago as 1361. Almost 300 years later, in 1619, Praetorius wrote that there were still to be seen a few keyboards with one short key, the B flat. Attempts were being made to play on two keyboards with one hand at the same time by 1555 or soon after.

Until the beginning of the 19th
century the naturals were slightly shorter from their fronts to the sharps (this is more to do with playing technique than design) and
often the naturals were darker in colour and the sharps lighter.
The custom of having the naturals a darker colour was said to have
originated in France to show off the player's hands to better
advantage. A piano made by Zumpe in 1766 had the black notes
divided into two sections controlling different strings, to allow
for the tuning of sharps as sharps and flats as flats. Each octave
could be divided into thirty-nine steps. The practical difficulties of playing such a thing ensured that it did not catch on.

It seems that around 1700 ivory was
used for key covering at times. Many and varied materials have been
used for this purpose, including bone, mother-of-pearl, porcelain,
tortoise-shell, silver, boxwood, cedar, ebony, pear and other rare
and polished woods. At times the fronts of the naturals were
beautifully carved. In 1816 a set of new replacement keys for a
Broadwood grand would have cost £3 s0 d0, and for a square
£2 s15 d0.

The English and Viennese actions
arrived on the scene around 1772 and the fronts of the Viennese
keys were more often ivory, like those on a modern piano. Silberman's keys used very thick ivory, 2.5 mm. French and English keyboards had moulded, inverted step-like keys which used decorative box woods and
sometimes the fronts were carved as well. Sometime in the 1830s
they changed to the key front shape we know to day.

Clagget in 1788 patented the idea of
putting glass on keys and later the French were using porcelain.
This was all an attempt to get the customer to buy the cheap end of
the piano lines.

In 1862 Cellulose was first made artificially from gun-cotton by A.Parkes, of Birmingham UK.
Called "Parkesine", it could simulate ivory. In 1869 John & Isaiah Hyatt (1837 - 1920), of New York, produced Celluloid from camphor and pyroxlin
(cellulose nitrate), and in 1870 Hyatt was granted a patent in the USA. Cellulose has been used for the key coverings on the cheaper pianos since then.

From about 1959, the most common covering for both white and black keys
has been acrylic plastic. The keys made by Lindner for about ten years from 1961 were of plastic and hollow and tended to break.

In 1963 Pratt, Read & Co.
introduced a moulded plastic shell wrapped around the wooden core
of the keys so that no wood was exposed. At present there is an
embargo on the use of ivory for key coverings.

Odd Keyboards

In 1862, Vincent suggested making a
keyboard with six rows of keys to make possible the playing of any
scale with the same fingering. In 1837 Obendrauf of Vienna made a
pianoforte with a keyboard designed so that children could play
intervals and chords with ease, but it is not known what the octave
span was on his piano.

In 1841, John Dwight patented a
seven-octave piano with a convex keyboard so the player could reach
the extremes of the compass more easily.

Bosanquet designed a generalised
keyboard harmonium with 53 keys to the octave in 1876. General Perrot Thomson in the mid-nineteenth century and Bosanquet in the 1880s
made harmonia for scientific purposes with 72 and 80 finger keys to
the octave respectively.

The dummy keyboard was in use before
this time but in 1890 or thereabouts Virgil invented the Virgil
practice clavier which was rather more elaborate. Pianos with pedal
keyboards had also been known for some time and were made until the
First World War or a little later.

Mangeot created a sensation in Paris
in 1878 with a two-manual piano. Each hand had its own keyboard,
but the keys for the left hand were reversed, making the furthest
note to the left the highest pitched. Pianists could play scales
and arpeggio passages with the same fingering but with the hands
moving in opposite directions. In 1878 Percival patented a piano
with two keyboards placed back-to-back vertically, 16 inches wide.
The compass was split between the hands. Paul Janko patented
Vincent's idea for a keyboard with six rows of keys in 1882.

In 1895 Pleyel patented a piano with a
keyboard at each end, apparently similar to that by Persson in 1850.

In 1929 a two-keyboard piano was made by Steinway’s factory in Hamburg, Germany. The two keyboards, one with the usual 88 notes, the other with only 76, The 76 note keyboard plays notes an octave above the ones on the 88 keyboard. Pressing a key on the shorter keyboard activates a mechanism inside the piano that pulls down the corresponding key on the lower keyboard, but an octave higher. The piano was rebuilt by Steinways in 2007

The Keyboard Compass

It can be safely said that the
development of the keyboard compass has been governed by man's lack
of technology, rather than man's desire for music. In the early
fourteenth-century organs, 14 keys per manual was the norm. Later
improvements in the link work and trackers, such as that by
Praetorius in the later fourteenth century, made it possible for
the increase of the compass and pipe size without compromising the
gaps between keys as on other contemporary organs with a larger compass.

Early clavichords had few keys. In the
roof on the nave of St. Mary's church, Shrewsbury, built during the
first half of the fifteenth century, there is a carving of a clavichord
with nine keys. In the basement of a church built in 1472 at
Certosa in Tavia, there is a picture of King David playing an
instrument with eight keys. He plays with the right hand, and it has
eight strings.

The Venetian inventor Spinnette
produced a four-octave harpsichord in 1503. The oldest
surviving harpsichord, dated 1521, now at the Victoria and Albert
Museum in London, has a compass of nearly four octaves and shows the use
of the short and broken octave idea. This is to provide a range of
notes greater than the compass of the keyboard.

The first virginal is attributed to the harpsichord maker Ruckers (Antwerp, 1575-1667), and had 21 naturals and an overall key width of 502 mm from B to A. Ruckers produced some two-manual instruments with the bottom manual running from second octave C to
sixth octave F and the top manual from second octave C to sixth
octave C, with these last two keys coming inline with each other
and tuned to the same pitch. In other words, the top manual was
tuned a fourth higher than the lower manual. Most of the Ruckers
instruments from 1620 had a range of C to E. A two-manual harpsichord dated 1599 runs F to F.

The Bonafines spinettino had a compass
of C to E with 25 naturals. This was around 1690. The 1722 Cristofori
piano ran C to C with forty-nine notes in all. By about 1726, some
harpsichord keyboards had expanded to five octaves and one from 1700
has four and half octaves. In 1745, Francisco Perez Mirabal was
making pianos in Spain. There is a piano in Madrid said to be his
and the compass runs G to G.

Burney, writing about this period many years later, said: "The ladies at that time, wearing hoops,
which kept them at too great a distance from one another, had a
harpsichord made by Merlin, expressly for duets with six octaves."
The square pianos made by Broadwood of 1780 had five octaves, yet
there were still some produced with a smaller range. Anton Walter, who made pianos for Mozart, used nearly five octaves. In 1763 Johann Heinrich Silberman, nephew of Gottfried Silberman, was making a piano with five octaves in Paris.

In 1790, Broadwood was the first to
extend the keyboard range to five and a half octaves and it is possible that the company made a grand with six octaves in 1794. However, Albrecht made a square grand with five and a half octaves going from F to F. This piano is at present in Charleston Museum and dated 1790. At the Finchcocks museum in Kent, a Broadwood grand from 1801, catalogue
number 25, runs F to F (see list below). Amber Kasper, an Austrian maker,
was still making squares with a three and a half octave compass, F to C, with an octave span of 153 mm, which was short, as most makers have spans over 160 mm. It is possible this square was for children. It was made about 1800.

An upright made by Hawkins in 1803 had
a five and a half octave keyboard F to F octave span, 158 mm, and no
pedals, just knee stops. Muller's upright of the same period had
five octaves running from first octave E. Between 1803 and 1816
Beethoven owned an Erard which allowed him to reach from sixth
octave F to seventh octave C.

Broadwood's price list of 1816 speaks
mostly of instruments with six octaves, but mention is made of a
cabinet piano with additional keys. This probably ran from bottom
C, which was usual, to seventh octave F. Broadwood's grand of 1818, made for Beethoven, had six octaves. Liszt played on a six-octave Erard in Paris in 1824. The square pianos of the period usually ran from first F to seventh C, but Broadwood's price list of 1828 shows some squares with six octaves, running from F to F. The Broadwood grand that was in the Museum at the Royal National College for the Blind, Hereford, around 1831, runs from first C to seventh F.

In the 1840s Broadwood made pianos with
the seventh A as the highest note. It would seem that by 1850 pianos
were made also being extended to bottom A, so by this time some
pianos had seven full octaves. At the Finchcocks Museum in Kent, a
Broadwood grand from 1850, catalogue number 31, runs A to A. Pianos with a compass of seven and a quarter octaves 88 note had arrived before 1870. It
is known around that date Chickering shipped a piano from Boston to
New York with that range.

In the UK Pohlmann & Son, Halifax in their 1871 advertisment claimed to be the first manufacturers in Britain to adopt the 88-note keyboard.

In 1908 Bösendorfer extended the range down to C below bottom A on their large Imperial Concert Grand, which has eight octaves. The lowest note is C below the usual A, up to the top C, 97 keys in all. The
piano is 9 feet 6 inches long Width: 5'9", Waght net: 1.255 lb. The standard keyboard of today is 88 notes, A
to C, seven and a quarter octaves.

Octave spans and compasses of various
keyboard instruments, most of which are fromFinchcocks
Living Museum. I would like to extend my gratitude to the museum for their help.